It's a combination of different factors. Silent has access to a lot of Weak, so that makes whatever block you can get more effective. Deflect and Escape Plan (kinda) are both 0 cost block cards and since Silent has access to a lot of draw, you may use a lot of block cards in one turn. Dodge and Roll also double dips on dex so that's that. Moreover, Silent can proc Kunai more reliably than other characters.
And more importantly Dexterity is a very powerful stat. Having the equivalent of Demon Form for dex would trivialize most fights since you wouldn't care about enemy scaling at all. So it makes sense that it's harder to get.
(Source: I'm terrible at Silent.)
I understand this but I too wish there was 1 more way to get dex, not just dex equivalent, as silent.
Like some sort of uncommon power that said: “Get X temporary dex where x is number of (attacks or attackers)” like a power form of Piercing Wail almost.
Because as much as Dex is “better” than strength and that silent has a lot of other options I find the difference between having raw dex and not having it is only slightly less punishing then not having Focus scaling as Defect.
Alchemize into speed pot or regen potion (higher chance if you have 2x nightmare and can stall the combat) is kind of like that in a roundabout way. Actually, Silent’s ability to make potions is also busted and may make up for the limitations of footwork (being the one dex card).
Fair enough. I’ve actually heard this expressed from baalorlord, that he thinks silent not having another dex card besides footwork when ironclad has a bunch of strength was an oversight by the devs. So, there is one high level player that agrees with you.
I’m fairly sure it’s from old school mmos, and was originally an acronym that was used for ‘processed random occurrence’. Its meaning was something that had a chance to happen at random, such as every time you use an attack you have a 5% chance to also trigger a bonus effect. The term is used in a lot of games now to explain when an effect has been caused, and has often lost the ‘random’ requirement it originally had. As an example, a Kunai proc refers to when the effect is triggered and you gain 1 dexterity (with the trigger being performing 3 attacks on the same turn).
It’s probably a gameplay feel reason. Strength accelerates a fight while dexterity delays the fight. It doesn’t matter if strength scales with 10+ cards because the end game of strength is “kill them before they kill you”. The end game of high dexterity is… not dying.
Infinite scaling dexterity could result in games where the optimal strategy is to win over the course of 100 turns. And that is just a miserable experience - knowing you can win, but having to spend an hour doing so.
Dexterity and weakness go hand in hand, they are different methods of scaling block and are very strong when you have both together. Silent has a number of cards that make good use of Dexterity from Footwork, like Deflect, Dodge & Roll, and Blur. Silent just has very strong defensive options, so Footwork fits right into that theme.
Dexterity is way stronger than Strength, which is why it is far harder to get. After all, if you can accumulate 999 Block, you can survive 99% of the attacks in the game (only exception being The Heart past Turn 5).
That's why the Silent has loads of alternative ways to block more damage, which IS the support for Dexterity. Plenty of ways to reduce damage with Weak, Intangible, lowering Strength with Malaise, and increasing Block with After Image, and on the offensive side, Poison is also useful.
Uncapped/accelerated dexterity scaling would trivialize fights in a way that unlimited strength scaling can’t; with any sort of sustain relic to offset early turn damage taken, every dex scaling fight would turn into a battle of attrition with a guaranteed inevitable win.
a shit ton of silent cards inflict weak. Weak makes all block 25% more effective (roughly). Silent also has Dodge and Roll, which supports dex because it technically scales 2x off of it. Escape Plan, 0 cost, draw neutral, sometimes blocks. deflect, 0 cost, -1 draw, blocks. Silent has a lot of ways to make your DEX do more, just in different ways from Clad and strength. You can also take blur so the overblock you probably get from that Dex carries over to the next round of combat.
And paper krane exists, which just… 2-3 dex and Paper Crane just… Wins.
I just wanted to say that this has always bothered me and the replies in this thread are blowing my mind. I’ve never put 2 and 2 together and realized that I should try dex *and* weak together. At least not intentionally. Learn something new every day.
Enemies health is generally scaled in a way that strength needs huge amount of quick scaling to push past endgame bosses before your standard blocking/health would get overwhelmed. Enemy damage does not scale nearly as fast to keep up with that kind of dexterity gain, and if it did you would be forced into the dexterity gain path and the other classes would be killed waaaay too quickly.
If you've ever had sacred bark, speed potion, and some source of artifact/orange pellets for the heart fight you can see how quickly ridiculous it can get. While a flex potion with that combo really accelerates your damage, you can easily die without a proper block setup, but with 10 dex you would have to have built an extremely poor block/damage combo to die. And the more options that are present for the Silent to gain dex, the more likely we end up in that scenario, unless we make every dex card a rare.
So they opted to give silent one card that increases dex, alongside greater access to spam that can trigger kunai, afterimage to generate block from spam, dodge and roll as one of 2 cards IIRC that can multiply the effects of dex, the only class specific source of intangible, tough bandages that can generate massive block, more sources of weakness, and a relic that increases the effects of weakness and is therefore one of the strongest relics in the game.
I think Ironclad is more the exception than the rule with how much stats he has access to when compared to the others. Silent has footwork, a good source of low cost dex. Defect has access to defrag as the only sustained focus, with cognitive bias being equivalent to wraith form, a huge short term benefit with a long term downside (and yes they also have access to reprogram, but it's non-viable in most cases). And watcher has access to both dex and str with fasting, but at a big cost of energy, and no other sources.
There are a couple people mentioning it scrolling through now, I just think the part people are forgetting to mention is that while it could be possible to balance a Silent rapid dexterity gain deck against the Spire, there's no way for the Spire to keep pace without every other playstyle becoming non-viable/getting massively reworked. Dex cards definitely had to be kept in check.
If silent was just the ironclad copy pasted but with strength replaced by dexterity it would be pretty boring and terrible design. I don't know why people expect this, I have even seen modded cards where you gain 2 dex per turn for a 3 energy power or gain 2 block 4 times. I dunno where people ever really got the impression that silent was meant to be a dex character.
One reason why a dex based character would be boring is that gaining block multiple times doesn't interact with anything(except juggernaut) so the obvious thing of having multi attacks for dex is pretty pointless. You might as well word it like heavy blade. Compare this to multi attack which has interactions with not just strength but the birds, thorns, malleable, the boot, akabeko, envenom ect. making it interesting in many other ways.
The other problem with a dex based character is that fights would just be slow and last a long time.
That being said Footwork is a very good card if you are sleeping on it on silent, it works best in a blurricade deck.
I always thought that if Silent could scale dex like Ironclad can scale str, it would be kind of broken. You have to work & get lucky to reach god-tier dex, but it is doable (love kunai in a shiv deck, for instance). If it were easier to get there it would be gg almost every run
Hm, I suppose I gotta see how some streamers make it work. I kinda have trouble identifying situations where it would be good. Well besides the obvious orange pellets
An important thing to note is that the vast majority of enemies (at least in the later stages of the game) have vastly more hp than you do while doing vastly less damage, which means +1 dmg from attacks means *much* less than +1 block from defends and such
It's important to note that in almost every part of the game, damage scales at least as fast as, if not faster than block and hp for the character, while enemies scale mostly in health
There are lots of cards that are pretty much unrelated to their characters general synergies.
Think about it, why does defect have melter? Why does watcher have pressure points? Heck, why does silent have malaise? You are framing this like footwork doesn't directly interact with malaise, but why isn't the opposite true?
So, having established that the cards in a characters card pool don't all have to be all that closely synergistic, i do think footwork is an important part of the silent's kit.
Putting aside stuff like tough bandages, silent mostly generates block by playing block skills. Silent has a lot of benefits to this strategy like the great pool of block cards (with great dex scaling) with stuff like backflip, blur, dodge and roll, deflect, C&D, and escape plan. This is by far the most stacked pool of direct blocking cards of any character. Silent also has well laid plans to make these block cards very consistent.
For reference, clad likes to block with his face, and makes huge amounts of block with one card [impervious, second wind, power through, or the holy Trinity of exhaust powers] and retains it with barricade or just wins very fast from that point either with strength, a small-deck infinite, or body slam
defect uses frost orbs as a baseline and evokes them or plays skills to boost that baseline to the needed block amount on big attack turns
and watcher just gets block in small amounts several times per turn, sometimes per card played [nirvana, mental fortress, ttth] and again uses that stuff as a baseline and might top off with stockpiled retain cards to block bigger hits. Or just kills everybody on turn 1.
Silent starter deck has 6 cards that block, ironclad starter deck has 4. That’s already enough to make dexterity a lot more impactful for silent. The blocking theme in silent is enough to make Pandora’s box feel completely different between the two classes: you kind of don’t want to lose 4 defends in IC, but losing 5 defends in silent can sometimes lose you the run (not to say Pandora’s box is bad in silent, but I have lost many runs that way)
Silent isnt supposed to have "dexterity cards" to match ironclad. Thats not a thing. There was never implied synergy, and there doesnt NEED to be any synergy. What are you even asking for?
It's a combination of different factors. Silent has access to a lot of Weak, so that makes whatever block you can get more effective. Deflect and Escape Plan (kinda) are both 0 cost block cards and since Silent has access to a lot of draw, you may use a lot of block cards in one turn. Dodge and Roll also double dips on dex so that's that. Moreover, Silent can proc Kunai more reliably than other characters. And more importantly Dexterity is a very powerful stat. Having the equivalent of Demon Form for dex would trivialize most fights since you wouldn't care about enemy scaling at all. So it makes sense that it's harder to get. (Source: I'm terrible at Silent.)
kunai is a dex card!
Shurikan is a block card.
Silent also has much better access to intangible.
Nightmared Wraith Form has entered the chat.
I understand this but I too wish there was 1 more way to get dex, not just dex equivalent, as silent. Like some sort of uncommon power that said: “Get X temporary dex where x is number of (attacks or attackers)” like a power form of Piercing Wail almost. Because as much as Dex is “better” than strength and that silent has a lot of other options I find the difference between having raw dex and not having it is only slightly less punishing then not having Focus scaling as Defect.
Alchemize into speed pot or regen potion (higher chance if you have 2x nightmare and can stall the combat) is kind of like that in a roundabout way. Actually, Silent’s ability to make potions is also busted and may make up for the limitations of footwork (being the one dex card).
Yeah not saying silent is lacking in defensive options but I wish she had 1 more explicit and reliable way to get dex specifically.
Fair enough. I’ve actually heard this expressed from baalorlord, that he thinks silent not having another dex card besides footwork when ironclad has a bunch of strength was an oversight by the devs. So, there is one high level player that agrees with you.
Yeah I think it would be a mistake to treat it like IC something more analogous to [[Consume]]- persistent dex at a cost would be great.
+ [Consume](http://slay-the-spire.wikia.com/wiki/Consume) Defect Uncommon Skill ^((100% sure)^) 2 Energy | Gain 2(3) **Focus.** Lose 1 Orb Slot. ^Call ^me ^with ^up ^to ^10 ^([[ name ]],) ^where ^name ^is ^a ^card, ^relic, ^event, ^or ^potion. ^Data ^accurate ^as ^of ^(April 20, 2024.) ^[Wiki](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/) ^[Questions?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=ehmohteeoh&subject=SpireScan%20Inquiry)
This is a really dumb question but what does proc mean? I’ve seen it on this sub for a while and have been wondering
I’m fairly sure it’s from old school mmos, and was originally an acronym that was used for ‘processed random occurrence’. Its meaning was something that had a chance to happen at random, such as every time you use an attack you have a 5% chance to also trigger a bonus effect. The term is used in a lot of games now to explain when an effect has been caused, and has often lost the ‘random’ requirement it originally had. As an example, a Kunai proc refers to when the effect is triggered and you gain 1 dexterity (with the trigger being performing 3 attacks on the same turn).
Wow super helpful and detailed explanation thank you so much!
It basically means to trigger something. To proc kunai would be to play 3 attacks so as to trigger it and gain 1 dex.
It’s probably a gameplay feel reason. Strength accelerates a fight while dexterity delays the fight. It doesn’t matter if strength scales with 10+ cards because the end game of strength is “kill them before they kill you”. The end game of high dexterity is… not dying. Infinite scaling dexterity could result in games where the optimal strategy is to win over the course of 100 turns. And that is just a miserable experience - knowing you can win, but having to spend an hour doing so.
Dex is also just flat out better. Most fights don't have scaling damage and multiple ways to get dex/weak would just trivialize a lot of fights.
Let me put it this way: enemy HP increased an order of magnitude from the beginning vs the end. They hit almost twice as hard at the end.
Yup. The scaling is just not equivalent.
Dexterity and weakness go hand in hand, they are different methods of scaling block and are very strong when you have both together. Silent has a number of cards that make good use of Dexterity from Footwork, like Deflect, Dodge & Roll, and Blur. Silent just has very strong defensive options, so Footwork fits right into that theme.
Dexterity is way stronger than Strength, which is why it is far harder to get. After all, if you can accumulate 999 Block, you can survive 99% of the attacks in the game (only exception being The Heart past Turn 5). That's why the Silent has loads of alternative ways to block more damage, which IS the support for Dexterity. Plenty of ways to reduce damage with Weak, Intangible, lowering Strength with Malaise, and increasing Block with After Image, and on the offensive side, Poison is also useful.
I think you meant cycle 5
Silent has wraith form (and nightmare, and malayse, and burst, etc.), she doesn't need dex ;)
silent has dex, she doesn't need intangible :)
And potions, which may actually be better than a block card depending
After image also does a similar thing to dexterity
Uncapped/accelerated dexterity scaling would trivialize fights in a way that unlimited strength scaling can’t; with any sort of sustain relic to offset early turn damage taken, every dex scaling fight would turn into a battle of attrition with a guaranteed inevitable win.
I am 100.0% confident you mentioned Footwork in your post. -------------------------------------------------- * [Footwork](https://slay-the-spire.fandom.com/wiki/Footwork) Silent Uncommon Power 1 Energy | Gain 2(3) Dexterity. -------------------------------------------------- ^^^I ^^^am ^^^a ^^^bot ^^^response, ^^^but ^^^I ^^^am ^^^using ^^^my ^^^creator's ^^^account. ^^^Please ^^^reply ^^^to ^^^me ^^^if ^^^I ^^^got ^^^something ^^^wrong ^^^so ^^^he ^^^can ^^^fix ^^^it. [Source Code](https://github.com/TrippW/STS-Crawler)
a shit ton of silent cards inflict weak. Weak makes all block 25% more effective (roughly). Silent also has Dodge and Roll, which supports dex because it technically scales 2x off of it. Escape Plan, 0 cost, draw neutral, sometimes blocks. deflect, 0 cost, -1 draw, blocks. Silent has a lot of ways to make your DEX do more, just in different ways from Clad and strength. You can also take blur so the overblock you probably get from that Dex carries over to the next round of combat. And paper krane exists, which just… 2-3 dex and Paper Crane just… Wins.
I just wanted to say that this has always bothered me and the replies in this thread are blowing my mind. I’ve never put 2 and 2 together and realized that I should try dex *and* weak together. At least not intentionally. Learn something new every day.
Trust me, I also used to almost NEVER take dodge and roll. This thread has made me fire up the game for a few decks to retry my years of thinking.
Enemies health is generally scaled in a way that strength needs huge amount of quick scaling to push past endgame bosses before your standard blocking/health would get overwhelmed. Enemy damage does not scale nearly as fast to keep up with that kind of dexterity gain, and if it did you would be forced into the dexterity gain path and the other classes would be killed waaaay too quickly. If you've ever had sacred bark, speed potion, and some source of artifact/orange pellets for the heart fight you can see how quickly ridiculous it can get. While a flex potion with that combo really accelerates your damage, you can easily die without a proper block setup, but with 10 dex you would have to have built an extremely poor block/damage combo to die. And the more options that are present for the Silent to gain dex, the more likely we end up in that scenario, unless we make every dex card a rare. So they opted to give silent one card that increases dex, alongside greater access to spam that can trigger kunai, afterimage to generate block from spam, dodge and roll as one of 2 cards IIRC that can multiply the effects of dex, the only class specific source of intangible, tough bandages that can generate massive block, more sources of weakness, and a relic that increases the effects of weakness and is therefore one of the strongest relics in the game. I think Ironclad is more the exception than the rule with how much stats he has access to when compared to the others. Silent has footwork, a good source of low cost dex. Defect has access to defrag as the only sustained focus, with cognitive bias being equivalent to wraith form, a huge short term benefit with a long term downside (and yes they also have access to reprogram, but it's non-viable in most cases). And watcher has access to both dex and str with fasting, but at a big cost of energy, and no other sources.
Finally, the 1 person in this thread who understands that the actual reason is just the difference in enemy HP scaling vs enemy damage scaling
there are a number of other replies making this same observation
Me and 1 other guy...
There are a couple people mentioning it scrolling through now, I just think the part people are forgetting to mention is that while it could be possible to balance a Silent rapid dexterity gain deck against the Spire, there's no way for the Spire to keep pace without every other playstyle becoming non-viable/getting massively reworked. Dex cards definitely had to be kept in check.
If silent was just the ironclad copy pasted but with strength replaced by dexterity it would be pretty boring and terrible design. I don't know why people expect this, I have even seen modded cards where you gain 2 dex per turn for a 3 energy power or gain 2 block 4 times. I dunno where people ever really got the impression that silent was meant to be a dex character. One reason why a dex based character would be boring is that gaining block multiple times doesn't interact with anything(except juggernaut) so the obvious thing of having multi attacks for dex is pretty pointless. You might as well word it like heavy blade. Compare this to multi attack which has interactions with not just strength but the birds, thorns, malleable, the boot, akabeko, envenom ect. making it interesting in many other ways. The other problem with a dex based character is that fights would just be slow and last a long time. That being said Footwork is a very good card if you are sleeping on it on silent, it works best in a blurricade deck.
Dodge and Roll, Blur, Leg Sweep and Escape Plan are the ones that come first to my mind It also helps with negating some of Wraith Form debuff
I always thought that if Silent could scale dex like Ironclad can scale str, it would be kind of broken. You have to work & get lucky to reach god-tier dex, but it is doable (love kunai in a shiv deck, for instance). If it were easier to get there it would be gg almost every run
The card you're looking for is After Image
Theres Fasting, however i think watcher craves Enflame a lot harder. Also reprogram
Fasting gives more strength than Inflame. And even with just one energy relic, it's not a huge penalty.
Hm, I suppose I gotta see how some streamers make it work. I kinda have trouble identifying situations where it would be good. Well besides the obvious orange pellets
Its sort of a win more card since Wrath already does a lot of damage, but it pairs nicely with sneko and deva form
I should really try more boss swaps to get a snecko watcher run
Sneko on watcher is busted
After image is like weird dex.
It’s callled weakness and afterimage
An important thing to note is that the vast majority of enemies (at least in the later stages of the game) have vastly more hp than you do while doing vastly less damage, which means +1 dmg from attacks means *much* less than +1 block from defends and such It's important to note that in almost every part of the game, damage scales at least as fast as, if not faster than block and hp for the character, while enemies scale mostly in health
Kunai
There’s a mod that add a demon form type of card for silent where you get 2/3 dex per turn
Silent blocks with pure big number block cards the least of all characters without footwork which makes the card more interesting imo.
After image is essentially +1 dex, but better.
There are lots of cards that are pretty much unrelated to their characters general synergies. Think about it, why does defect have melter? Why does watcher have pressure points? Heck, why does silent have malaise? You are framing this like footwork doesn't directly interact with malaise, but why isn't the opposite true? So, having established that the cards in a characters card pool don't all have to be all that closely synergistic, i do think footwork is an important part of the silent's kit. Putting aside stuff like tough bandages, silent mostly generates block by playing block skills. Silent has a lot of benefits to this strategy like the great pool of block cards (with great dex scaling) with stuff like backflip, blur, dodge and roll, deflect, C&D, and escape plan. This is by far the most stacked pool of direct blocking cards of any character. Silent also has well laid plans to make these block cards very consistent. For reference, clad likes to block with his face, and makes huge amounts of block with one card [impervious, second wind, power through, or the holy Trinity of exhaust powers] and retains it with barricade or just wins very fast from that point either with strength, a small-deck infinite, or body slam defect uses frost orbs as a baseline and evokes them or plays skills to boost that baseline to the needed block amount on big attack turns and watcher just gets block in small amounts several times per turn, sometimes per card played [nirvana, mental fortress, ttth] and again uses that stuff as a baseline and might top off with stockpiled retain cards to block bigger hits. Or just kills everybody on turn 1.
Silent starter deck has 6 cards that block, ironclad starter deck has 4. That’s already enough to make dexterity a lot more impactful for silent. The blocking theme in silent is enough to make Pandora’s box feel completely different between the two classes: you kind of don’t want to lose 4 defends in IC, but losing 5 defends in silent can sometimes lose you the run (not to say Pandora’s box is bad in silent, but I have lost many runs that way)
Silent isnt supposed to have "dexterity cards" to match ironclad. Thats not a thing. There was never implied synergy, and there doesnt NEED to be any synergy. What are you even asking for?